


In a Hell of a Fix

by Lady Disdain (cat_marlowe)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-02-10 03:43:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18652204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cat_marlowe/pseuds/Lady%20Disdain
Summary: Endgame fix it. HEAs FOR EVERYBODY. *pounds gavel*





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was no possibility on earth that Steve Rogers would have spent all those years married to one of the world’s best intelligence officers and sat on the fact that Hydra had wormed its way into the organization she founded. Steve Rogers was a lot of things but restrained and discreet weren’t on the list.

Look, Bucky knew he was a bit paranoid. He’d been that way even before Hydra. A couple decades of worrying himself sick over what dumb shit Steve was going to do next would do that to you. If every time you turned your back, your best friend slapped a cop or yelled at a nun or got himself arrested, you learned pretty quick not to turn your back. And then, after the...other stuff...Bucky was pretty firmly a back-against-the-wall kind of guy. A healthy dose of suspicion never killed anybody. 

This was all to say, Bucky had always been pretty grateful for whatever sixth sense made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

That is, until he saw Steve on the bench and started reaching for a knife that wasn’t there.   

 

***

While Sam fondled the shield and looked adoringly at Steve, and Steve looked vaguely into the middle distance, Bucky wandered over to where Banner was packing up the time travel contraption.

“Where’s the other Steve?” Bucky asked. “There’s our Steve who went back in time and stuck around in the past and got old, and then there’s the Steve who came out of the ice in 2011.”

“It’s all one Steve,” Banner said, as if that made any sense at all. “The thawed out Steve was always going to travel back in time. It’s a thing.” He waved his hand vaguely.

Bucky tried again. “Okay, but during the past twelve years, there have been two Steves—old Steve and Cap Steve.”

“No,” Banner said slowly. He scratched his chin. “Or maybe?”  

Bucky tried to look patient. Really, you ought to need some kind of license to fuck around with time travel. “But Steve staying in the past should have created a pocket universe or whatever you called it, right? Wasn’t the idea that Steve couldn’t change anything about the past, or else he’d cause reality to branch off into its own universe or whatever?”  

“Yeah but maybe this, right here, is the universe he created.”

Right. So, Bucky understood that was possible. He also didn’t care how many universes there were, because in none of them did any of this shit make sense. “Uh huh,” he said.

“Maybe Steve kept a low enough profile that he didn’t change history.” Banner shrugged. Bucky wanted to hit him.

“I’m supposed to believe that Steve Rogers managed to _keep a low profile_ for _seventy years_ ? That asshole couldn’t _walk home from church_ without nearly getting arrested. You know him, Banner.”

Banner threw him a pitying glance. “People change. It’s okay to grieve--”

Bucky went back to his motel room and cleaned his guns, and it wasn’t even as meditative as it usually was, because the people in the next room were yelling about bigamy. He felt bad for all the family law courts who had to unfuck this Thanos garbage.

 

***

It was four a.m. He ate a sleeve of Ritz crackers with peanut butter and tried to sift through his thoughts. 

Okay, sure. People changed. And maybe whatever fucked up shit Steve had seen during the past five years made him so eager for a home life that he kind of lost his mind for a bit and thought it was even remotely okay to leave Bucky in 2023 without, like, mailing a letter from the past or whatever shit they do in movies. Bucky was no stranger to emotional trauma fucking with the finer points of etiquette.

But there was no possibility on earth that Steve Rogers would have spent all those years married to one of the world’s best intelligence officers and sat on the fact that Hydra had wormed its way into the organization she founded. Steve Rogers was a lot of things but restrained and discreet weren’t on the list.

And then once Steve had decided to play fast and loose with the timeline by taking down Hydra half a century before he was supposed to, surely he’d think about rescuing Bucky. Bucky was pretty sure he wasn’t just flattering himself in thinking Steve would tear down heaven and earth to get him back from Hydra. Shit, the fucker had nearly destroyed the Avengers to keep Bucky out of a comparatively cozy prison.

At least that’s what Bucky would have thought. Maybe he had been wrong all along? Maybe Steve didn’t--maybe things really had changed in the past five years? Maybe Bucky’s judgment was clouded by jealousy that Steve had chosen a lifetime with Peggy instead of more time with him. Maybe he just felt betrayed, left out, abandoned.

No. Nope. No way. This was some Hydra-level gaslighting he was doing on himself. The one thing he had always been sure of, at least when he was in his right mind, was there was no limit to the dumbass choices Steve would make on Bucky’s behalf. Steve Rogers’ dumbassery where Bucky was concerned was as reliable a fact as the sun rising in the east.  

 

***

There was a knock on his door. Bucky sighed and rooted around in his bag for candy and his cellphone. It had been a week since Banner snapped 3.5 billion people back into existence and they were still finding kids wandering around, looking for parents who had moved. Social services couldn’t keep up but pretty much everybody had their number programmed into their phones by now.

He looked through the peephole. It wasn’t a kid.

“He’s asking for you,” Sam said. He was holding the shield, which Bucky had to admit was kind of cute for running errands.

Bucky collected his weapons and hair stuff and stowed it all in his backpack, then flung it over his shoulder and walked with Sam back to the Starks’ cottage, where Steve was staying. One bright side to the reverse-snap (other than, like, being alive again, which Bucky guessed he was glad about, even though the dead-alive-dead again merry go round was pretty much old hat by now) was that nobody had been able to get gasoline for days. That had to be good for the ozone layer or whatever, even if interstates were blocked with broken down cars.

Bucky climbed the stairs to the porch, where Steve was looking out onto the lake. “Buck,” he rasped.  

“Stevie,” Bucky answered, sitting beside him, waiting for that rightness he always felt around Steve. Even when he had been trying to flat out murder Steve, he had known Steve as something familiar, something right, something _his_.

It was wrong, it was all wrong, and Bucky didn’t know if it was just that seventy years changed Steve into a stranger whose presence felt wrong, or if Bucky’s head was fucked up, or--

No. His head was fine. He got rid of that thought. Instead he looked at Steve, taking in the line of his jaw, the bump on his nose, all so familiar despite the aging. Clenching his teeth, bracing himself for something he didn’t dare even think of, he looked Steve in the eye. But those were Steve’s eyes, the blue only slightly faded by time.

For a minute he thought he might cry, not because his Steve was now old, but because he thought he’d never get a chance to see this. When they were kids, nobody in their right mind would have put money on Steve making it past thirty. Then there was the war and everything that came after. Plenty of chances for somebody with a death wish to kick it.

He reached out his hand, wanting to touch Steve’s face.

“I tried to get you back,” Steve said. “But we couldn’t do it without stranding ourselves--and you--in another dimension.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, dropping his hand. “I bet.”

And then Steve fiddled with his wedding band (it looked platinum, and not for one hot minute did Bucky believe that Steve would pick any kind of wedding band other than shiny yellow gold, what the fuck) and...that was it. Bucky felt like he was dismissed.

He got a notebook and a couple pencils from Stark’s kid and went back to the motel. His key card didn’t work in the lock, so he went to the front desk.

“So the thing is,” the guy at the desk said, looking shifty as hell, “we had to increase the rate for your room because we have a lot of demand." He gestured outside, as if Bucky might not have noticed all the people milling about.  

“Pretty sure that’s illegal.”

“My dude, there’s 3.5 billion extra people looking for a place to sleep."

Buck took out his key card and started to slide it across the desk, then thought better of it. He flipped the card and flashed a smile he knew to be terrifying. “Here’s the thing. What’s happening here is a state of emergency. A humanitarian crisis. The Red Cross would be here if they weren’t busy in New York and Tokyo and Mumbai.” The news footage was a wall to wall shitshow. “So, buddy, you get the day off.” He waved to the door. “Bye.”

“You can’t do that,” the guy protested.

“This motel has been requisitioned. We’re using it for billeting kids and old folks now. Talk to your local government about fair compensation.” Which was almost verbatim what they had said during the war, so Bucky wasn’t going to feel bad about it.

Three hours later he had kids bunking with grannies, turned the front desk over to an un-snapped librarian who knew how to use a pistol, and went outside.

***

 

He climbed to the roof of the motel and got out his scope. It wasn’t a proper sniper’s nest but it was close enough and even after all these years some idiot part of his brain associated snipers’ nests with keeping Steve safe.

He balanced the notebook on his knee and chewed on the end of a pencil.  

He needed to figure out when things started to be wrong, when the hairs on the back of his neck had started to do their thing. Steve had seemed fine during the Battle of Wakanda. It wasn’t like they’d had time to bond or whatever, but they had fought together and it had felt as normal as fighting an alien horde was ever going to feel.

Then Bucky died (again) and woke up (again) and about ten minutes later was in the middle of another battle with Thanos. Steve had been fighting alone, which was incredibly reckless and stupid and therefore not at all out of the ordinary for Steve. But when Bucky showed up and started to fight near Steve, Steve hadn’t adjusted, hadn’t oriented himself so Bucky would have his six.

All right, maybe it was the hammer--that shit was weird enough it could have thrown off anybody’s fighting style. Or maybe Steve had developed a different way of fighting after five years without Bucky, but they had fought seamlessly after a gap of seventy years. Bucky didn’t buy it. Weapons of the gods, long absences, it didn’t matter: Bucky was supposed to have Steve’s back.

He wrote down: “Battle. Steve didn’t let me have his six.” Seeing it written down made it seem less like a delusion, more logical, harder to argue with.  

Then, after the battle there had been Stark’s funeral. Steve had done a lot of solemn Captain America posturing, which was what anyone would expect. So, that was fine.

After the funeral, though, Steve had avoided him. At the time, Bucky chalked it up to Steve being busy, figuring out a strategy for getting those rocks back where they belonged, but that was just Bucky gaslighting himself again.  

Five years could change a man. Bucky might know that better than anyone else alive. But the only time Steve had actually avoided Bucky was that one week in ‘36 when he was short on rent and didn’t want to ask for help. And back then it hadn’t been avoiding so much as spending a lot of time with his hands jammed in his pockets and his toe scuffing the ground while pretending nothing was wrong.

He wrote down: “Steve avoided me.” He didn’t write down that he had gone to bed alone every night, wondering when there would be a knock on his door. He didn’t write that he kept waiting for Steve to throw his arm around Bucky’s shoulders. Just: Steve avoided me, because that was the same thing.

Look at that, Bucky was journaling now. Pre-Thanos, his Wakandan therapist had tried to get him to keep a journal, and now he was finally doing it. On an asphalt roof, dressed in tac gear, and with a rifle on his lap. And the thing he was journaling about was whether Captain America was...possessed? Brainwashed? Still. It was a journal.

Then he got to the part that really didn’t make sense.

When Steve said goodbye to him before traveling back in time to return the infinity stones, Bucky had hardly been able to look him in the eye. Because Bucky couldn’t imagine a Steve who planned to travel back in time and not at least ask Bucky whether he might want to be liberated from the clutches of the Nazis who were holding him captive. Instead he had done the Captain America Jaw Thing and told him it was going to be all right.

At the time he told himself this was because Steve was being a stubborn asshole who fully intended to take Hydra down single handedly, throw Bucky over his shoulder, and...cart him back to the present? Stay in the past with him? He didn’t know. He knew Steve understood the risks about fucking things up for people in various other universes, but he also knew Steve well enough to know that he couldn’t let evil pass unnoticed in whatever fucking dimension he happened to be in.

During those five seconds they waited for Steve to come back, Bucky half expected to disappear. He knew that Banner said it didn’t work that way, but maybe Banner was wrong, maybe Bucky would just fade away and none of the past seventy years would have happened and Steve would rescue him at the bottom of that ravine in the Alps and they’d go home and--

And Steve could have that life with Peggy. It wasn’t like Bucky would stop him. He’d never been able to deny Steve a single damned thing, would follow the asshole to hell and back, and—yeah, he’d be okay watching Steve and Peggy get married and have a bunch of kids.  

But then Steve showed up on the bench and maybe Bucky hadn't deserved rescuing. He had done bad things, and his time with Hydra was punishment.

Except—no. That wasn’t how Steve thought. Steve thought Bucky hung the moon, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

He wrote down, “Steve would have promised to save me,” and it felt like a lie, the way all good things sometimes felt like they belonged to someone else. But he knew it was true.  

If he ever saw that therapist again he’d tell her journaling maybe had done him some good.

 

***

That night, on the roof, he made a list of possibilities:

  1. Dementia (which wouldn’t explain Steve’s weirdness before traveling back, and he was pretty sure the serum would fix dementia anyway)
  2. Steve knew he had fucked up by not rescuing him from Hydra, so was avoiding Bucky (and this still didn’t explain Steve’s weirdness before traveling back, unless at that point he had planned on not rescuing Bucky)
  3. Steve was possessed by...demons or aliens or whatever possessed people. Hydra, maybe? (Bucky supposed Hydra had sort of possessed _him_ , in all possible senses of the word.)
  4. this person wasn’t Steve at all 



He crossed off numbers one and two.

 

***

And here was the thing. If it was number three or four, then Steve needed Bucky to rescue him.

In the dark of the night, Bucky sharpened his knives.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky hadn’t slept for three days and sleep deprivation didn’t tend to produce his best ideas; it probably wasn’t great from a mental health standpoint that demonic possession and shapeshifting currently seemed like solid explanations for why his best friend was being an asshole, but in the absence of any better suggestions he was sticking with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've changed the rating to M and increased the number of chapters to 5. 
> 
> Thanks to Miriad for the beta reading and brainstorming and general enthusiasm.

It turned out that in the future, people still read about spaceships and monsters and aliens, but now instead of bright shiny tales of a hopeful future, the stories were just Fuckups in Space. Bucky found a dark comfort in the idea that people would inevitably use all that gadgetry and technology to build a fresh new hell, that no matter what there would be stories of people trying to survive in a world that was grim and hard and apocalyptic. 

Shit, Bucky knew about when the future turned into a fucked up nightmare. He was probably the world’s greatest expert on how the future could fuck itself up seven ways to Sunday.

So when he checked the news on his phone (it was his now, after he stole it from some punk who was messing with a lady behind the motel) and saw that there were riots in dozens of airports, on top of the food riots and the gas riots, he knew a dystopia when he saw it. 

On the one hand, it didn’t exactly shock him that this had been Steve’s doing: Steve Rogers had never met a bad idea that he didn’t commit to fully. He was all about the grand gesture, the poorly thought out acts of self-sacrifice. But he usually only sacrificed his own stupid ass and left other people out of it. Nat, though--they had planned this before she died, and he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t thought two steps ahead. Bucky knew he would have, and it wasn’t his ego talking. People like him and Nat just had a lot of first hand experience with what worst case scenarios looked like.

The night was quiet as he patrolled the perimeter of the motel parking lot. Through one of the open windows, he could hear a television talk show. A mother whose child survived the snap was sobbing about missing the first five years of her kid’s life. Another kid was crying about how he had been put in an orphanage along with all the other kids whose parents hadn’t survived the snap, and now he was expected to go home and be happy about it.

Really, Bucky was among the more balanced and functional members of society these days, and that was the most disturbing thing of all. 

***

Once upon a time, when they were fourteen or fifteen and trying hard as hell not to be queer, and failing every goddamn day after school anyway, Steve had packed a picnic lunch and dragged Bucky to Prospect Park. Bucky had bitched and moaned the whole way: they had an algebra test the next day, and Steve might be a punk who didn’t care about things like grades or his mother’s feelings, but Bucky had been raised right, etc. Steve had just told him to shut his cake hole and have a fucking picnic already. 

Bucky shut his cake hole and had a picnic already. He didn’t know why he even bothered arguing with Steve--he always gave in sooner or later.

It had been one of those hot, sunny days at the end of September, when you’ve had it with summer and you’re ready for fall. They had spent the whole summer out on fire escapes and on the roof and Bucky didn’t know why he couldn’t just sit down and study, maybe screw around on the carpet in Steve’s apartment if his mom was working a double shift. 

“See,” Steve said once Bucky’s mouth was filled with peanut butter sandwich and he couldn’t talk back, “isn’t this nice? Aren’t you glad you came out?” Steve’s nose was covered in freckles from all the time they spent outdoors that summer, and his hair had bleached to the color of butter. “This is probably the last day we’ll have like this.”

Bucky opened his mouth to ask what the hell Steve was talking about, since they had years of lazy sunshine ahead of them, when he realized what Steve meant. Soon it would be too cold, and after that would come the pneumonia and Steve’s annual brush with death and Bucky’s annual brush with lunacy. 

“You asshole,” Bucky said. “If you think you’re going to make me feel better about failing my algebra test because this is  _ your dying wish  _ or some shit, you’ve got another think coming.”

Steve had laughed and Bucky had pelted him with the crust of his sandwich and when they got back to Steve’s place, Steve had dragged him inside by a belt loop. Bucky had kissed him, a real kiss. Before that it had all been furtive handjobs and clumsy rubbing but that day they had a real kiss, and that day Bucky lost his last shred of plausible deniability about being over the moon for Steven Grant Rogers.

During the war, when nobody needed a bad winter to worry about dying, Steve had seized any lull in the activity to drag Bucky off--not for a picnic, because a war was on and who the fuck had time for a picnic, but for a half-melted chocolate bar that one of them would dig out of a pocket. “It’s a nice day, Buck,” he’d say, and Bucky would grumble about guns that needed to be checked and men who needed to be scowled at. “Aren’t you glad you came out?” Steve would ask, shit-eating grin firmly in place.

Once, after they had been fired at for hours, Steve waited for a lull in the gunfire and whispered “it’s a nice day, Buck” while passing him a cigarette. During the next lull in the fire, Steve whispered “aren’t you glad you came out?”  and they both had to bite the insides of their cheeks to stop from laughing even though they both were pretty sure they were going to die.

People always said Steve Rogers was an optimist, and maybe he was, but if so, he was the kind of optimist who had gotten used to doing a lot of living in between the times when he was about to die.

Every time Steve had visited him in Wakanda, he’d find a reason to tell Bucky it was a nice day, even though every goddamn day of Bucky’s life was a picnic, him and his goats, dining in the great outdoors.

He hadn’t said it once since Bucky came back from the snap.

***

Bucky hadn’t slept for three days and sleep deprivation didn’t tend to produce his  _ best  _ ideas; it probably wasn’t great from a mental health standpoint that demonic possession and shapeshifting currently seemed like solid explanations for why his best friend was being an asshole, but in the absence of any better suggestions he was sticking with it.

His gran would have said the devils were in Steve, but even after spending most of the 20th century with Hydra and running into most flavors of evil this world contained, he had never seen any devils, as far as he knew. Still, he’d put a pin in that idea. He knew about skrulls, and if there was one kind of alien shapeshifter, there were probably a dozen more, because there was never just one type of trouble. Nat had that hologram face mask, and he guessed something like that could be used to disguise a person’s entire body. Then there was that alien asshole--Thor’s brother? Boyfriend? It was unclear--who had done mind control on Nat’s friend during the Battle of New York. The wizard who had opened the portals also seemed able to do pretty much whatever the fuck he wanted with magic, so there had to be other people in the universe with roughly equivalent skill sets. 

The prospect that Steve was possessed or an alien shapeshifter really should not have been so reassuring. The problem was that he didn’t have any reliable intel on demonic possession or shapeshifting and he didn’t have any sources he could go to. 

Well, absent existing intel, he’d have to collect it himself. 

***

Once it was light enough to see (the streetlights were out as part of rolling blackouts that were supposed to help with the surge in demand for electricity), he slid off the roof and spent a couple hours making sure the motel hadn’t turned into a lawless hellscape (it had not, but that might be because he made nightly patrols with a kalashnikov). At a time that he thought it might be reasonable for civilians to have breakfast, he went to the cabin. 

The door was unlocked, because probably you don’t worry too much when you have a couple of superheroes under your roof, even if one is 120, give or take. He pushed open the door and swiped a muffin off the counter. Sam, Banner, and the kid were watching cartoons, Potts was on the back porch, which meant Steve was in his bedroom. Slipping past the room that held the television, he stalked toward the bedroom that he knew, thanks to some quality time with his scope, was Steve’s. He tapped at the door and heard a hoarse “come in.” 

Steve was reading a--Bucky peered at the book cover--a mystery novel? With a picture of a pie shop on the cover? If he wasn’t possessed, then he really was leaning into the old man thing. At Bucky’s entrance Steve raised an eyebrow. “Early for social calls,” he said.

“No such thing, not between old pals, right?” Bucky asked. He took a bite of his muffin and swung himself backwards onto a chair. “Hey, I meant to ask you, where’d you get the shield? Did you have Howard make you another?”

Steve shot him a sharp look, which was a nice change from the soft-focus middle distance shit he had been doing the other day.

“Or did you pick it up from some past version of yourself?” Bucky went on. “Can’t be that, either, though, because then you’d be leaving your past self without a shield.”

Steve looked at him for a long minute. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I’ve got all day Stevie.” Inspiration struck. The last couple of times he had talked to Steve, he hadn’t wanted to test Steve’s memory, because it felt like indulging his paranoia, and also because maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. But now he thought he knew the answer and was only looking for redundant corroboration. “It’s a nice day,” he said slowly, fucking telegraphing it in case Steve had just forgotten. “Shame to spend it indoors.”

“All right then,” Steve said, not showing any recognition. “Let’s go sit outside.”

Something old and familiar coiled up inside Bucky, and he was glad he hadn’t come unarmed.

***

Like hell was Bucky sitting on a bench. They were having this conversation clear out of hearing range of any superheroes who happened to be hanging around the cabin. 

“So, pal,” Bucky said after they had walked halfway around the lake. “I guess what I’m asking is what’s going on. Did you figure out how to hop universes or something?” The hilt of his combat knife was a comforting presence against the small of his back. 

The look Steve slid over to him was so sly, so shifty, that it almost took Bucky’s breath away to see it on Steve’s face.

“Time travel is much more complicated than you understand.” Steve’s voice was oddly airy now, as if the manicured lakeside path had been transformed into a lecture room. “And dimension-crossing even more so.”

“Listen, I’ve had Potts, Wilson, Banner, and the kid explain it. I’m not a dipshit, I know how it works.”

“I beg your pardon,” Steve said, and for a moment Bucky had a sense of the mask slipping, of something showing beyond the Steve-like surface of whoever it was he was talking to. He knew where his knife was but he didn’t grab for it yet. “When I said that you don’t understand, I didn’t mean you personally. I meant humans.”

Bucky swallowed. “Didn’t realize you were that much above the rest of us,” he said.

“Nonsense. You knew, which is why you’re here, having lured me away from that ridiculous hovel. What a pity it is that midgardians see fit to meddle in everything they don’t understand. It is the most predictable thing about you people.” 

As the other man spoke, Bucky saw it again, a glimpse of a person who wasn’t Steve. Dark hair, weasely face, green coat that looked like it belonged on a stage magician. Bucky thought fast. If this man had an agenda--and he obviously did--it couldn’t be too immediately evil because all he was doing was pretending to be a senior citizen. He didn’t leave the cabin, he didn’t have any visitors, he didn’t even seem to have any weapons on him. In other words, Bucky didn’t need to stab the guy. Yet.

“What do you want?” Bucky asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“I think not, James Barnes.” The Steve illusion had dropped away by now, revealing the stranger to Bucky. “First, you will tell me what  _ you _ want.”

“I want to find my friend,” Bucky said, because that was the truth, what it came down to. He could come up with half a dozen other very good reasons, none of which counted a fraction as much as finding Steve, saving Steve, following Steve--that’s all that mattered, all that had mattered for so long it had worn a groove into Bucky’s being. Following Steve, and a talent for violence: that was Bucky. 

The look the stranger shot Bucky was equal parts pity and amusement and Bucky didn’t want either. So, this guy, he seemed like a pompous asshole and he had referred to humans as midgardians. That narrowed down the field to exactly one.

“So, Loki, can you help me find my friend?” He thought he left  _ or do I need to stab you?  _ heavily implied.

“By the gods, I hope so, otherwise we’re entirely fucked,” Loki said with vulpine smile.

“All right then,” Bucky said, with his own answering predatory grin, “start talking.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki could not believe this was what it had come to. How lowering.
> 
> “So,” the scruffy-looking vagrant said. A knife had materialized in his hand but Loki didn’t think actual magic was involved so he couldn’t bring himself to care about it. “Where’s Steve?”

Loki could not believe this was what it had come to. How lowering. 

“So,” the scruffy-looking vagrant said. A knife had materialized in his hand but Loki didn’t think actual magic was involved so he couldn’t bring himself to care about it. “Where’s Steve?”

“About that,” Loki said, smiling expansively. “You’ll think it’s very droll--”

“Wouldn’t bet on it,” the soldier snarled. His glower was really quite good. Loki nearly admired it, despite not feeling much in an admiring sort of mood.

“--but I had to hide him in 2012," Loki said with a shrug.

The soldier--he had a name, but it was a stupid name, and Loki couldn’t be bothered anyway--narrowed his eyes. “2012. Battle of New York, 2012? You switched places with him when he and Stark went looking for the tesseract and the mind stone.”

Unless Loki was very much mistaken, which he seldom was, the soldier looked gratified by this information, as if it confirmed some long-held suspicion of his. Loki supposed it stood to reason that this man would notice that his closest companion had been replaced by a cunning copy. It was a feather in Loki’s cap that nobody else had noticed. Truly, disguising himself as an elderly Rogers and pretending he had been away for decades had been a masterstroke: any gaps in his knowledge could be excused as the forgetfulness of the aged, and also he didn’t need to worry overmuch about stray avengers climbing into his bed. 

Loki idly examined his fingernails. “That’s when, shall we say, he got off the ride and I got on.”

“You mean to tell me there are two Steves running around in 2012. And one of them knows Hydra is in SHIELD and also that I’m alive.” His eyes got a far away look to them, as if imagining what holy hell his friend could have unleashed. The expression was not, Loki thought, unmingled with fondness.

“No, because we’re going to go back to precisely the moment when I switched with him. He won’t have had time to wreak too much havoc.”

“You don’t know Steve. Wait. Does that mean you’re the Loki from 2012?”

A difficult question, and one that didn’t deserve a straightforward answer. “Well, we both know I’m not the Loki from anytime after 2018.” If he had hoped to garner sympathy with this allusion to his own death, he missed the mark, because the soldier rolled his eyes.

“So it’s been, what, two weeks since you brainwashed Barton and tried to hand earth over to a bunch of space insects? And you want me to believe you’re a good guy now?”

Ugh. Midgardians. And, well, Asgardians too, come to think. So very invested in concepts like “personal responsibility” and “blame.”  “Don’t be tiresome,” Loki said, brushing a bit of lint off his sleeve. “I’d had a rough year.” Which really was no more than the truth. And while Loki truly ought to have known better than to get mixed up with Thanos, he had not entirely been in his right mind at the time. And, what was more, he had quite thoroughly learned his lesson since then. The past two weeks or years or however one was meant to measure time when one had quite abandoned progressing along it in a linear manner, had been an object lesson in not trusting people who wanted to accumulate power. Whether that included Loki himself was an esoteric sort of question that he’d trouble himself with after he got out of this fix. “Besides,” he went on, “did you hear what Barton got up to all on his own? I’d say he was better off with me in his head.”

Would you look at that, the hobo now had two knives out. “Not a big fan of brainwashing,” he growled.

Loki sniffed. “I really don’t think you’re in a place to judge.”

“Not interested in judging.” From the way he brandished those knives, he looked like the only thing that he was interested in was disemboweling. And  _ this  _ was the person he had as an ally. But the man had a lean and hungry look; he knew what it was to lose things, he knew what it was to fight. He was not, Loki guessed, a particularly honest man, thank God. He’d kill and maim and do unspeakable things, and he’d do them for Rogers. Loki could use that. Because while it was a losing proposition to trust people, Loki had seen that lawless look in other men’s eyes. And that, that he could trust.

In any event, Loki was not in the habit of explaining himself to badly groomed strangers. The last scowling, bearded, judgmental bastard to whom he had tried to explain himself had been Odin, and a fat lot of good that had done either of them. “The key point, is that this--” He gestured around him. Sirens wailed in the distance, the scent of smoke drifted through the air. He didn’t need to explain to Barnes that this was not an optimal situation.  “--Shouldn’t have happened.” 

“Right,” the man said. “I guess hindsight is 20/20 or whatever.”

“No, this isn’t about hindsight. It literally shouldn’t have happened. This is against the rules of nature.” Loki didn’t expect Midgardians to appreciate the finer points of magic. And he gave his brother a pass because Thor had never thought particularly well when his emotions got the better of him. Also it had been more than a little gratifying that he took Loki’s death so badly. He smoothed his lapels. "It's also against the rules of common sense." He noticed that the soldier didn't seem like he disagreed. Good.

“Do you mean that fucking with time travel caused a pocket universe, or whatever it was Banner was going on about?” the soldier asked.

Loki held up his hand. “Please disregard everything the Midgardians have told you about time travel.” He paused. “I find it soothing to disregard Midgardians entirely. But the point is that, yes, fucking with time travel, as you put it, causes other realities to branch out from one’s own. It’s...something to be avoided.”

“Why?”

_ Because my mother said so  _ seemed an unsatisfying response, true though it was. So he flicked a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry your head about that. Just understand that if time travel is bad, doing anything with that godforsaken gauntlet is a thousand thousands times worse. It is, frankly, unspeakable.” Loki felt quite exhausted with sincerity, utterly worn out by this foray into plain talking. “Really, you ought to thank your lucky stars that I’m here, or you wouldn’t have the first clue how to go about fixing this mess.”

Loki expected more snarling or the appearance of yet another knife, but instead something softened in the man’s face. “Right,” he said. “It’s you or nothing.” The way he said nothing was as packed with despair as two syllables ever had been. When he said nothing, he meant  _ nothing.  _ And nothing meant the absence of his friend.

Yes, Loki could use that. A drive like that, a want that powerful--it was a tool Loki could bend to his will. But also--by the gods, he could not even imagine what it must be like to think of another person and have  _ that  _ happen to his face. Loki wanted to help him, if only so he never had to see that bleakness again.

“Okay. Brass tacks. How are we getting Steve out of 2012?”

“We aren’t,” Loki said. Somehow, the combat knife in the soldier’s hand had been exchanged for what looked like a machete. “We are, however, going back to 2012 ourselves. Time travel is bad, but going backwards is better than forwards. Don’t ask why.” The why was something Loki was keeping to himself until he had no choice about it. “This is a situation where time travel is the lesser of two evils. You don’t strike me as the sort of man to balk at a pragmatic solution.”

The soldier blinked, and somehow packed that single gesture with exasperation, world-weariness, and bloodlust. “Is the plan to sit around for six years and then prevent Thanos’s snap? I thought that would just create another world where--”

Loki wrinkled his nose. “Stop being so tedious. You expect me to spell out the mysteries of the universe and I don’t feel like it.” All this transparency went against his nature and was, frankly, boring. But in order for his plan to work he needed Steve Rogers’ trust, and in order to get that trust he needed to hand over Rogers’ friend.    
  


***

Loki looked at him narrowly, just a flicker of a glance, and Bucky knew that whatever came out of the man’s mouth was going to be a pack of lies.  

Bucky had found that the best way to deal with liars--whether pathologically dishonest Asgardian shitbags or Hydra or even Steven Grant Rogers when he had that gleam in his eye----was to shut them up before they could start lying. Because once they started lying, they were like a cart rolling downhill. There was no stopping them. They started to like the sound of their lies, and then you were stuck listening to their bullshit and trying to sift out the truth and it was a waste of everybody’s time. Better to make them shut up. With Steve it had been easy enough to find something else to do with his mouth. With Hydra, well, they had just needed killing. And with this guy? A cigarette would have to do.

“No. Spare me.” Bucky took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one for himself, before holding the pack out to the other man. Loki made a ‘don’t mind if I do’ gesture and took one, then leaned in to light it with Bucky’s match. 

Bucky took a drag of his cigarette and ran through his options. This guy wasn’t trustworthy, but that didn’t matter. Trust was, in Bucky’s opinion, highly overrated. 

A couple of times in the war, Steve and Carter had shouting matches over whether to act on intel from people who might have been French freedom fighters or who might have been Nazis. He remembered Carter snapping, “Of course we don’t  _ trust _ them Rogers. This isn’t a parlor game. We don’t operate on trust. We decide whether it’s tactically advantageous to act on their intelligence. Heaven help me, Barnes, make him listen to reason.” Bucky couldn’t remember what they had done in that case--not because of the amnesia, but because that situation had played itself out so many times he couldn’t keep track. Steve believed in trust. He  _ needed _ to trust. That was what had fucked him up so much about SHIELD being evil. If he couldn’t trust SHIELD, then he could only trust himself, and the problem with that was that he was a fucking maniac, so what did trusting himself get him? A couple years as an international fugitive, that’s what. (And Bucky. It got him Bucky.)

So, yeah, Bucky was pretty agnostic when it came to trust. He didn’t need to trust Loki. He just needed to decide whether it was tactically advantageous to act on his intel. And in this case, there was no question.

His gut feeling was that the guy was telling the truth that Steve was in 2012, and that he wanted to take Bucky there. The rest of it? Probably bullshit. But the rest of it didn’t matter. That probably made Bucky the dumbest sap, not to mention a no-good monster, because he’d abandon this mess of a universe if it meant following Steve.

Well, that was nothing new.

“Cards on the table,” Bucky said. “My cards. Yours are a trick deck and written in elvish or whatever, so your job is to keep your mouth shut and listen. You’re a bad bet but you’re the best bet I’ve got, so I’m all in. I have a couple questions, and I only want answers if you feel like telling me the truth. Otherwise just save it. One, does it matter that there will be two of me in 2012?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Loki said promptly, and it had the ring of truth. “There have already been two Steves and two Starks in 2012, so we know it doesn’t do any damage in the short term. Long term, I couldn’t say.”

Bucky nodded. “Fair. Why did you switch with Steve in the first place?” Bucky’s money was on Loki having done it just to fuck with the Avengers, but at some point his goal must have changed. Getting beaten bloody by Thanos was a bit committed for a prank.

“Pass.”

“Did you know you could hold Thor’s hammer?”

“ _ Pass _ ,” Loki said, more emphatically than before. “I’ll tell you this: fighting like your friend is exhausting. What is  _ wrong  _ with him?”

“Been wondering that my whole life. Last question: did you return the infinity stones?”

“Pass.”

That wasn’t bad. It meant Loki could stop his tongue from lying if he wanted to. It didn’t make him trustworthy, didn’t make him reliable, sure as shit didn’t make him any kind of ally. But Bucky could work with this. 

A sound came from behind them. “Footsteps,” Bucky said, and stomped out his cigarette beneath his boot as fast as if Sister Mary Margaret was about to come around the corner and find him smoking behind the school. He grabbed Loki’s cigarette--Loki was already in his Steve suit, which was deeply creepy, but not even on the top ten list of creepy things Bucky had seen this century--and did the same. “In the future, people don’t smoke,” he muttered in answer to the other man’s look of blank astonishment.

Sam appeared around a bend in the path. “Hey, I was wondering where you had gotten to. Oh, hey, Barnes, you two catching up?” He sniffed. “Have you been smoking? Y’all nasty.”

“The serum prevents lung cancer,” Bucky said. He flicked a glance over at Loki, and saw that the man was staring vaguely at nothing. That was his entire schtick, wasn’t it--act old, stare at nothing, avoid any incriminating conversations. And this was the god of mischief. Jesus Christ, Bucky had expected better.

Sam kept glancing between them, from Loki to Bucky and back again, as if they were a game of sudoku he couldn’t quite work out. “Huh,” he said.

“Huh what,” Bucky said. 

“You two okay?” Sam asked. 

Right. Of course Sam noticed that Bucky and Steve weren’t okay. There was two feet of air between them, which wasn’t right no matter how old Steve was supposed to be, no matter how long he had been away. “We’re quarreling,” Bucky said, and out of the corner of his eye saw Loki nod in a way he probably thought was very sage. “Steve’s being an asshole, for a change.”

“Right,” Sam said. “Sure. I’ll be going now,” he said, went back along the path toward the house, pausing once to glance over his shoulder at the two men. “You’d better not litter. I don’t even want to find one cigarette butt up here. And I’ll be checking, Barnes.” He did the two fingered ‘I've got my eyes on you’ gesture.

“Seriously?" Bucky said once they were alone. "Are you even trying to keep up the act?"

“It doesn’t matter what happens in this world,” Loki said airily. “We can go now. We have plenty of those Pym particles--” he spoke those last words with audible quotation marks “--and the embarrassing outfits.”

“Where did you get--oh, never mind.” He didn’t need to know where Loki got the extra Pym particles from. Probably he lifted them from SHIELD (which was to say: Hydra) in 1970, either when he stole the tesseract or when he returned it--if he returned it at all.  “I have one thing I need to do before we go,” Bucky said. 

He walked back to the motel and gave his two spare pistols and a couple of knives to the librarian he had deputized as the head of this operation. 

“I have to go away for a bit,” he told her. “If I don’t come back, and things don’t settle down here, at least keep the kids and the old ladies safe.” She looked at him like he was out of his mind, but she took the weapons. 

He grabbed his backpack and headed back to the cabin. He hadn’t bothered asking Loki what would happen to this world if they wound up altering things in the past to prevent Thanos’s snap. He hadn’t even asked  _ if _ they were going to prevent Thanos’s snap. Because here was the thing: Loki might have a plan. But so did Bucky.    
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks to miriad for the beta read and the brainstorming!


End file.
